The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many types of office automation equipment and network-enabled devices, such as multi-function peripheral (MFP) devices, include scanning mechanisms. For example, some so called “all-in-one” MFPs provide copying, scanning and faxing functionality at a very affordable price. One of the limitations of scanning devices is that they do not protect the documents that have been scanned in a secure manner. Typically a document to be scanned is loaded into an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) or placed on a flatbed. After scanning, a document in the ADF is discharged into a pickup area and a document on the flatbed remains there. In both situations, the document that was scanned is not maintained in a secure manner and can be removed by anyone having access to the scanning device. This can be problematic in situations where the documents to be scanned contain sensitive information or are confidential. In these situations, users must wait until the documents have been completely scanned, which can take a long time for documents that contain a large number of pages or are scanned at a high resolution. Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach for scanning documents that does not suffer from limitations of prior approaches for scanning documents.